As he gathered his team of Cumberland American Little Leaguers on the field in Williamsport, where they’d just been eliminated from the Little League World Series, coach Dave Belisle felt as emotional...

By Jim Donaldson

As he gathered his team of Cumberland American Little Leaguers on the field in Williamsport, where they’d just been eliminated from the Little League World Series, coach Dave Belisle felt as emotional as the 12- and 13-year-olds around him.

“I was very emotional,” he said on Tuesday morning. “Mostly because I knew I’d never be coaching this great group of kids again.

“But I knew I had to control myself, because I knew how upset they were about the loss. So, when I spoke to them, I talked about everything but the loss.

“I tried to gather my thoughts, and speak from the heart.”

It was a heartbreaking loss the kids from Cumberland had suffered, an 8-7 setback at the hands of the Great Lakes Region champions, the talented Jackie Robinson West team, from Chicago.

After falling behind, 6-2, early in the game, Cumberland rallied for five runs in the third inning to take a 7-6 lead. But they couldn’t score again and wound up a run short in the end.

That was the end of what has been a remarkable, and delightful, run for the Rhode Island and New England Region champs.

As Belisle knelt on the infield grass, he could hear his players’ muffled sobs and see the tears slowly rolling down their youthful cheeks.

While it was a sad moment for the disappointed players, they had every reason to hold their heads high and be proud of what they’d accomplished.

As Belisle said Tuesday morning, by phone from Williamsport: “It’s hard to believe that we went from playing in Cumberland in the spring to playing in the Little League World Series on ESPN in August.”

The network had asked Belisle if he’d wear a microphone during the games.

“I had no second thoughts about it,” he said. “When it comes to young kids, everything I say is going to be positive.”

And so it was that a nationwide audience got to hear the wonderful, memorable words Belisle said to his players just minutes after their season and their championship dreams ended.

By now, you’ve probably either read his postgame speech in Tuesday’s paper, or seen the video of it on The Journal website.

By the time Belisle finished, it wasn’t just the kids on the field who had tears in their eyes. Just about everyone watching and listening did, too.

“I love you guys,” he told his players near the end of his talk. “I’m gonna love you forever. You’ve given me the most precious moment in my athletic and coaching career, and I’ve been coaching a long time — a looooong time. I’m getting to be an old man. I need memories like this. I need kids like this. You’re all my boys. You’re the boys of summer.”

Belisle is best known for coaching the boys of winter.

For more than 30 years, he has been assisting his father, Bill, a Rhode Island coaching legend for turning out phenomenally successful high school hockey teams at Mount St. Charles Academy.

Dave laughed Tuesday morning when told about a tweet sent by a former player who lightheartedly wrote that, if it had been Belisle’s hockey team that lost in Williamsport, he’d have made them push the bus back to Woonsocket and then go through a two-hour practice.

“It’s a different perspective,” said Belisle, “in talking to a teenage hockey player who’s 17 or 18 and a Little Leaguer who’s 12 or 13. If you say something negative to a young boy who’s just struck out, or made an error, or missed the cutoff man, they’re done for the game. They’re not going to perform.

“And hockey’s a much different game [from baseball]. You’re trying to motivate someone to go out on the next shift and hit somebody.”

That’s why, although Belisle has been asked to wear a microphone during televised high school hockey games, he has declined.

Throughout the Little League World Series, the national audience was hanging on Belisle’s every word.

Although there also was a joke going around that, when he was heard talking to his players, the network would scroll across the bottom of the television screen a translation of Belisle’s New England accent so the rest of the country could understand him.

But everyone who heard him got the message.

And appreciated it.

During the early innings of Monday night’s game, the CEO of Little League Baseball, Stephen Keener, praised Belisle in an interview with the play-by-play announcers, calling him “one of the finest examples of a Little League coach I’ve ever seen.”

Anyone who’s heard Belisle’s postgame talk with his team will always remember it.

“If it was good,” he said Tuesday morning, “it was because it came from the heart. I wanted to tell the kids how much I appreciated what they’d done.

“They really are a good bunch of boys, with really good parents. I’ve had some incredible teams over the years, but I’ve never had one where the kids picked each other up so consistently, both on the field and off.

“The most important part,” he said, “is that they’ve enjoyed each other’s company.”

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